Archive for April, 2012

I’m sloooowwwwllyyy trudging my way through a really fun screenplay. It’s actually four (maybe five) mini-stories that will be kind of episodic. I miss novel and short story work, but screenplays are a lot of fun. You really have to think about storytelling differently.

Fooled you: THERE IS NO INVISIBLE BOX, SUCKERS. Acting.

And speaking of storytelling…I’ll be in a movie this year. Acting. Yeah…it’s been a strange year.

“WTF?”, you ask? It makes sense to me for a couple of reasons. My favorite creative work is hands-down long-form fiction. But ultimately, once you boil it down to basics, I love storytelling. Novels, shorts, ultra-shorts, movies, audio stories are all forms of storytelling; and acting and moviemaking are just two more aspects of that. You get to tell a story from deeper inside the narrative: from inside the head of one of the characters. I’ve done a couple of auditions and an acting workshop, and have enjoyed the process immensely. I can’t even describe how much I’m looking forward to this project.

Also…it’s a personal stretch thing. Acting, it turns out, is hard. Setting your mind into a mode where your body and face are in control, where you are planning your next words and actions without looking like you’re planning them, where you have to say and do things convincingly that may be in total opposition to how you, personally, would behave…that’s not easy. The people I’ve met in the Vegas filmmaking world are committed, hardworking, talented, and have a perspective on the world that you don’t get in a lot of circles. With few exceptions, these are people with day jobs (often two or three), who pursue acting/modeling gigs constantly, are perpetually rehearsing, auditioning, working, writing, filming, planning, and trying to find some kind of balance in their lives. Spending time with hard-working dreamers is one of the best things you can do, I think.

After this project, my goal is to 1. Help the director for whom I’m writing the short screenplays cast, film, and edit that project, and 2. Use this knowledge and experience to direct my own short film later this year. Possibly based on my first published story, “Billy Don’t Like Clowns.”

So…please, if you’re on Facebook, stop by the page for our little film—”Lights Camera Action“—and LIKE it. It’s a small, independent feature-length project directed by Will Jackson, and we can use all of the support we can get. I’ll share more details about the movie as we progress. Filming should start in mid-May, just after I get back from Bangkok (that’s a story for another day). Since we mostly all have jobs, it’s going to be a night-and-weekend thing, I suspect.

Also: there’s a poolside scene, which means I have about ten thousand situps to do between now and then.